by Sarah Dalton
Reva hunched her shoulders. She did not care if she had made Luca feel guilty. He should feel guilty, she thought fiercely.
“Lady Avalon, I will be honest with you.” Brother Axil reached out to touch her hand. “I was glad when you came back. I thought you were a good influence on Luca when you first arrived. You delighted in life, despite all that had happened to you. You gave him hope for the future. You, of all people, never behaved as if he was destined to die. Your friendship was good for him, and I believe he has never stopped loving you.”
Reva swallowed hard. She had held Luca in her heart for all these years as well, but she was realizing now that the Luca she loved might not exist anymore.
“Luca faces more than even a seasoned king could expect to handle with grace,” Brother Axil said bluntly. “Stefan is a dragon shifter, Reva. He is powerful, and he has the backing of the Order of Insight. They have grown in strength in the countryside. I am afraid that if we do not find him and defeat him quickly, he will gain so many followers that we will have not a clash of two armies, but a true civil war.”
She knew it was true. She had seen the processions of people whipping themselves. They were desperate. “Stefan is the reason the plague spread as far as it did. He built temples instead of sending doctors.”
“You and I know that. To the people in the countryside, however, Luca is the younger brother who arrived with a Xanti army. He knows he faces a strong enemy, and he does not know where Stefan is or what his plan might be. That alone would be difficult for any king. But he has also been brought to power by Xantos. They have their ships in the harbour. If it were to come to a fight between them and our armies, it would not be easy to say who might win. Luca walks a fine line with Lord Tinian.”
“And you think my influence will help him somehow?” Reva could not keep the incredulity from her voice.
“Yes.” Brother Axil smiled at her disbelief. “Do not look so surprised, Lady Avalon. You always spoke your mind. You confronted injustice without a second thought.”
Reva thought of how she had become so silent and afraid as Francis’s wife. “You do not know what has happened since I left Nesra’s Keep. You do not know me now.”
“On the contrary,” Brother Axil said. “I know that you came here with nothing, and when you had nothing to gain by fighting with Luca, and everything to lose, you told him what you thought of his actions without any hesitation. You, hungry and alone, left a fine dinner rather than ease his guilty conscience. Reva, he is torn between what he knows is right and what he feels he must do. He will break one way or another, and we must make sure he stays true to himself. Otherwise, he will be no better a king than Stefan.”
“No.” Reva felt exhaustion creep into her. How long would this go on, these night-time meetings by the fountains? “He was my friend before. I will not manage him like a horse. I will not lead him. If he is to be a good man, he will be a good man on his own.”
“Do you truly believe that?” Axil asked. “You know that none of us lives alone in this world. Do you think all of your courage and your goodness is yours alone? Has no one ever inspired you to be stronger?”
Reva fell silent. Karine popped into her mind. Amma. How long had it been since she had thought of Amma?
“To say that Luca must be strong without our help is to discount everything else that is happening,” Brother Axil said. “Were he not the king, were he not faced with these problems, perhaps he would be the boy you remember, Reva. But that is not how the world stands.”
Reva hesitated, then nodded.
“Will you help, then?” Brother Axil asked. “Will you keep speaking with him, keep telling him what you think? I am not asking you to lie, Reva. I am asking you to tell him the truth and remind him of his heart.”
Reva nodded again. When she was married to Francis, she had needed to be reminded once too.
Brother Axil, to her surprise, sighed. “Of course, there is also the matter of that ‘Brother.’”
“What brother?”
“He calls himself Brother Josef, but he is no true Brother of the Enlightened,” Brother Axil said firmly. “He may not even be Menti. He has convinced Luca that only he can teach him the skills he needs to defeat Stefan.” He shook his head. “But I think we have examined enough problems for one day. Any training Luca does with his powers is surely good.” He stood and bowed to Reva. “Lady Avalon, I thank you, and I am glad that you are safe.”
Reva smiled at him. “Thank you, Brother Axil.”
Brother Axil began to walk away through the gardens, but paused only a few steps away.
“If I might ask,” he said, turning back to her, “what are your powers, Lady Avalon?”
Reva bit her lip. “I am like Stefan,” she said. “I am a dragon shifter.”
Brother Axil stared at her for a very long moment. “You are nothing like Stefan,” he said finally. “But that is very interesting. Another dragon shifter. I wonder….”
“What?” Reva frowned at him.
“When we first saw Stefan, I thought that Mount Zean might erupt. When it did not, I told myself that I had been thinking as a foolish old man. Those were only legends. But now I wonder, Lady Avalon—if there are more dragons than just Stefan, perhaps there is another explanation.”
Reva frowned at him, but Brother Axil only smiled enigmatically and left her with another bow, disappearing into the night.
Karine
Karine huddled in the darkness outside the inn. She had been walking for three days under increasingly heavy skies, and now, on the third night, dusk had come with a light drizzle.
She told herself not to go into the inn. She was now entirely drenched, and the cloth of her gown stuck to her body. She did not have to imagine what the men inside would make of that. Not only that, but she knew the Sisters must be searching for her—if not them, then Lieutenant Gerras.
She felt a pang of regret at that. Lieutenant Gerras had been kind to her. He had done all that was within his power to make the women comfortable, and he had taken Karine to see Rohesa when he certainly did not need to do so. Whatever he believed of Menti, he had treated her as a person, and for that, Karine was grateful.
She understood that using his face to escape would be a special kind of betrayal for him. Would he remember, as she did, the moment she had studied him? Would he believe her if she said that it had not been all calculation on her part?
It did not matter, she told herself, because she would never see him again.
She settled herself down in the corner between the inn and the stables. There was a small space where the two buildings did not quite align, but the roof hung low and gave her some protection from the rain. At least it was a warm night, and perhaps someone would throw scraps into the pigsty that she could eat. Once, she would have believed she was above eating slops, but that was before she had been brought to the Gardens of Anios.
Nearby, shutters banged open. Karine jumped, but it was only a window. She could see the golden light inside catching on the raindrops. She curled closer into the shadows anyway.
There was a clattering of pots and pans, and someone heaved something out into the darkness. The contents of a chamber pot? Or something edible? Karine was saved from scrabbling after it to find out by the fact that the window was still open.
A moment later, justifying her suspicion that it was not safe, a man’s voice said, “I don’t like it.”
“You don’t like anythin’,” another voice replied.
They both had the faint twang of country folk from this part of the coast, and Karine judged that neither of them were nobles. They were probably servers taking a break, or tavern-goers who had slipped away from the noise.
“I keep my eyes open,” said the first one. “That’s all. You could stand to, you know.”
“It’s just a meeting. If you say you keep your eyes open, then you should go see. Just go t’ Haverhill. He’ll be there in a few days.”
This was interesting.
Karine frowned over at the window. Some of the words were half-lost in the rain, but she did not dare move any closer.
“No one knows who he is,” the first voice said. “That’s dangerous enough. Probably some noble playin’ at being a king. What does he call himself? Just a lord, right? But lord nothing.”
“Not a lord,” the second one corrected. “The Lord.”
“The Lord of what?” The first voice snorted. “I told you, he’s just taking advantage of the plague.”
“They say he’s more,” said the second one stubbornly. “An’ I’m going to see what. They say he travels with a bunch of priests. They say he always wears a mask. They say he has powers.”
“A Menti? That’s bold. Someone’s going to gut him sooner or later for that.”
“Not a Menti. Different kinds of powers. Magic.”
“Magic means Menti,” the first voice said, uncompromising.
“But he’s for Anios. They say he is Anios. That’s what I meant by him being something more. That’s what I heard. I want you to see it for yourself, because I knew you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
The first man sounded disgusted now. “He’s not a god, Timo. Th’ gods aren’t real, not like that. He’s just a Menti, trying to gain followers instead of getting killed. But it’ll come back around, you mark my words.” His words faded toward the end, as if he were walking back into the inn.
“What if he can cure the plague?” Karine made out, and then nothing.
She frowned as she wrapped her arms around herself. Who was this Lord who wanted to cure the plague? If she never heard the name Anios again, it would be too soon, but she was curious. What Menti would willingly ally himself with the priests of Anios? Was it, as the suspicious man had suggested, no more than an insane bluff, a Menti who wondered how far he could get by pretending his powers were given by a god instead of being normal magic?
At first, she could not imagine any Menti doing something so rash. Then she supposed that after a lifetime of hiding in the shadows, knowing that the Sisters might come and find her at any time, she might try playing pranks on them, too. There was no safety for a Menti in this world, not with the Order of Insight growing so fast.
King Stefan had much to answer for.
Karine settled down against the wall and tried to make herself as comfortable as she could. No one should come around this part of the inn. It was not a pleasant summer night, good for hurried trysts up against the wall of the inn. On a night like tonight, who would be conducting any business unless they needed to? She was safe for now. She could sleep.
She closed her eyes and lay still, shivering slightly. She was tired of being hungry all the time. All she had ever wanted was to live a normal life, marry a boy from the village, maybe have children of her own. She had been good at embroidery, and she had thought she might travel to the fairs and sell some of it there for a bit of extra coin. She and her husband could make a good living that way.
Then her powers had come, and everything had changed. Now she simply wanted to survive, and she had seen enough in the Gardens of Anios to know that she could be robbed even of that wish. There were things people could do to you that would break your spirit entirely.
She felt tears welling up and tried to force them away. She was doing what she could to fix all of this. She wished now that she had told Lottie where she was going when she left. The thought that Lottie might believe Karine had simply left her and run away alone, made Karine want to cry.
She opened her eyes with a little moan—and it took everything in her not to scream. A face out of a nightmare looked back. It was almost human, and yet terribly inhuman at the same time: slit-pupiled, with a flat nose and a long tongue snaking out to taste the air in front of Karine. Something in her mind screamed distantly that this face belonged to a monster, that there were probably claws and sharp teeth and that they would rip her to shreds.
It could not be real. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again.
As she had expected, the figure was gone. Karine let out her breath and tried not to moan in relief. She must have dozed off into a nightmare. Perhaps she had been dreaming of strange things because of what the two men had said about that Lord, about his strange powers.
Perhaps.
She told herself it could not possibly be real. Still, she kept jerking awake to stare around herself until long after the tavern had gone quiet.
“Do not be ridiculous,” she told herself. Her voice was lost in the hiss and pop of the rain. She did not fear being overheard. “Even if it was real, which it wasn’t, you clearly weren’t what it was looking for.”
That was enough for her to get to sleep, though it was a cold and hungry night. Tomorrow, she told herself, she might see Reyalon by the time she stopped for the night. She had to be getting close.
And in Reyalon, God willing, she would find Reva.
The Lord
The Lord stood over his table with its maps and markers and stared at the world. Xantos and Estala, either opposed or tenuously allied for centuries. Foolish kings sought to resolve the conflict one way or another. This body had hated Xantos. The Lord could still smell dregs of it in the air when he thought about the place.
Curiously, he allowed the soul that had belonged to this body to rise for a moment. Xantos, he said to it, and like a petulant child, it gave him images of brightly coloured clothing and strange food, jewellery that glinted on the ears of men and women, laughter and music. Above all of this rose hatred that burned in the pit of the Lord’s stomach. Xantos was made of rot and decadence, the human soul told him. Its people were nothing. They had no respect.
The Lord pushed the soul back into its cage without bothering to respond. It protested briefly. It was Anios reborn, it was a dragon, it would cleanse the world, how dare he do this to it.
You are nothing, the Lord told it. You are a gnat, just like all the others. You wanted what was mine.
At that, his own fury rose up. Mortals no longer understood such things. They tried to take what belonged to a god by right: worship. The soul that had owned this body had believed that the people of Estala should bow to it and sing hymns to it. How dare it? It had believed that a human could somehow be a god reborn, as if a human soul could ever encompass the power that lurked in a god.
Even a younger god. Even the little brother.
The Lord snarled his fury at all the old taunts. Little brother, you will never be as strong as I am. You are not truly a god, not like me. They will never worship you as they worship me.
Oh, but they would. While his elder brother disdained to take mortal form at all—and the Lord could see why, for this was a special sort of hell—the Lord would not disdain such things. He would rally the people to him, their worship would give him power, and when it was all done, he would sit in the place of the highest god. He would sit alone, because he would not make the same mistake his brother had made. He would leave no rival alive.
And when he had no rival for his place, the world would be his. Forever.
The Lord laid his fist on the map, and his lips stretched into a terrible smile. Xantos, Estala, none of it mattered. They were both nothing more than dirt swarming with insignificant beings. They liked to think they had their own plans for the way the world would be shaped. When he was done, they would have no such concerns. Their only concern would be worshipping him.
The question was, should he start with Estala, where he now found himself, wiping out the Xanti fleet and the Estalan army in one swift blow, or should he take the riper pickings of the Gold Port, now only tenuously defended, and prepare for a longer war from a position of strength?
He was studying the map contemplatively when Brother Mikkel entered the tent. The Lord looked over at him and waited, and after a moment, Brother Mikkel knelt and put his forehead to the ground. Even he, the zealot, rebelled against such a humble gesture, but after an altercation two nights past, he did it out of fear.
Fear was enough. Let
the others see Mikkel and adopt his mannerisms. In time, when they saw the Lord’s true glory, they would understand that they had been right to treat him with respect. For now, their devotion would serve to draw others to the cause, others who truly worshipped. The Lord would grow stronger from it.
“What is it?” the Lord said finally.
“Lord, I bring news from Xantos.” Mikkel stood once more. The Lord tasted fear in him, as well as desperate bravado.
This was very interesting. What had Mikkel done?
“As you know, Lord, you have come into your powers as a dragon, but Mount Zean has not yet erupted.” Brother Mikkel folded his arms inside his sleeves. He waited for the Lord to speak, but when the silence had stretched on, he continued with a nervous gulp. “I feared what this might mean.”
Out with it, you fool. The Lord forced himself to be calm. Mikkel was still useful. Until he had another second-in-command, he must cultivate this one. “You need never fear to tell me the truth, Brother Mikkel.”
Brother Mikkel relaxed, showing himself to be a greater fool than the Lord had imagined, and ducked his head in a shallow bow.
“Of course, Lord. What I mean to say is, when I first saw you transform, I believed that you were the last of the dragon kings come to Estala in its time of need so that we might bring about the Kingdom of Anios.”
The Lord waited. There were too many errors in Mikkel’s recounting for the Lord to bother correcting them. It was Stefan who had transformed, not the Lord. It was not Estala they sought to rule, but the entire world. Mikkel was still constrained by his paltry human ideas of armies and conquering, as if the only way the Lord would triumph was by force.
Still, he wanted to bring about the Kingdom of Anios, and the Lord would thus permit him to continue his work.
“When Mount Zean did not erupt, I believed that it would simply take some time. That perhaps it would erupt when you sat on the throne.” Mikkel hurried onward now, trying to make his words more palatable with sickly smiles. “Yet you were crowned, and still there was no eruption. It was then that I realised the truth.”
